You may have heard people urging you to switch your website to the HTTPS security encryption. They cite Google’s announcement that HTTPS is a ranking signal and that failure to switch could mean your ranking will take a hit.
Let’s face it, until recently, HTTPS was really used only by ecommerce sites for their payment pages. Things can get confusing, and the question many business owners face is whether or not the hassle of switching to HTTPS is worth it.
HTTP stands for hypertext transfer protocol. It’s a protocol that allows communication between different systems. Most commonly, it is used for transferring data from a web server to a browser to view web pages.
The problem is that HTTP (note: no "s" on the end) data is not encrypted, and it can be intercepted by third parties to gather data being passed between the two systems.
This can be addressed by using a secure version called HTTPS, where the "S" stands for secure.
